In most medical laboratories, especially those established in connection with hosptial blood banks, two of the most common tests performed each shift are those of blood typing and antibody screening. The principal value of these tests is to discover incompatibilities between donor and recipient blood which could produce harmful and potentially lethal consequences.
In today's laboratories such tests are frequently performed by a tedious manual one-drop-at-a-time procedure which not only consumes a great deal of time but also promotes boredom and potential carelessness. Further, manual techniques utilizing droppers require uniform handling if uniform results are to be obtained and do not allow much room for the idiosyncracies of individual technicians. Thus only gross replication of results between technicians is within reasonable expectation. A further problem inherent in current laboratory procedures arises from the need to uncap and individually dispense each vial of anit-serum and red cell reagents each time the test procedure is performed. This constitutes up to as many as 200 exposures per vial of reagent to cross contamination and the technologist to the risk of AIDS, hepatitis and like blood carried threats.
Thus a true need exists for a device which has the ability to quickly and accurately provide readily reproducible laboratory results in a manner which substantially precludes the exposure of the reagents and technicians to contamination by foreign substances.